Sandia is moving its decades of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) and the MELCOR multi‑physics toolkit from light‑water reactor practice toward modeling advanced reactor and fuel‑cycle designs. That effort aims to produce the quantitative safety profiles regulators need to license novel reactors and to make public risk comparisons credible.
— If regulators lack validated PRA tools for advanced designs, licensing will stall, public acceptance will lag, and deployment timelines for low‑carbon reactors could be delayed—so investing in and scrutinizing these modeling capabilities matters for energy and climate policy.
EditorDavid
2026.01.10
65% relevant
Pushing tokamak operation into a previously inaccessible 'density‑free' regime creates new failure modes and off‑nominal behaviors that probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) and validated multi‑physics tools will need to model; the paper’s claim implies licensing and safety frameworks must adapt to evaluate high‑density, long‑duration plasmas if such regimes are pursued commercially.
2026.01.05
100% relevant
Sandia’s decades of NRC support culminating in SOARCA and the MELCOR code are explicitly being extended to capture the full spectrum of advanced reactors and fuel‑cycle facilities.
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